Another day, another report of a Obama transition team member who just happens to have played a big part in the Fannie/Freddie fiasco:
One of Obama’s top transition team members, Thomas Donilon, oversaw an aggressive, backdoor lobbying campaign by mortgage giant Fannie Mae to undermine the credibility of a probe into the firm’s accounting irregularities, according to a 2006 government report on the company.
The effort — which reportedly included attacks on the funding for the oversight agency, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, and an attempt to launch a separate investigation into OFHEO itself — was ultimately unsuccessful, and regulators eventually discovered top Fannie Mae executives had been manipulating the company’s financial reporting to maximize their bonuses.
~~~Obama transition advisor and ex-Fannie Mae executive Donilon has not been accused of participating in the accounting irregularities. But he did oversee its lobbying, and helped paint a rosy picture of Fannie’s financial health to the company’s board, OFHEO investigators concluded, a picture that was ultimately proven false.
Donilon declined to comment for this article.
President-elect Obama has pledged to change the culture of coziness between officials, lobbyists and lawmakers in Washington. But the role of Donilon in the Fannie Mae scandal raises questions about just how much of a break the Obama administration will be from business as usual inside the Beltway.
How much of a break from business as usual? Absolutely none. It was all talk, and the masses brought it hook, line and sinker for the most part because the media never did it’s job in vetting this Socialist.
Quite curious how the MSM has finally decided to do some digging isn’t it? They even asked the Obama team about this lobbyist and their answer will remind you of the Jim Johnson story. Basically saying the guy is a volunteer….what are they supposed to do with a volunteer? Recall:
“I am not vetting my VP search committee for their mortgages. …These aren’t folks who are working for me. They’re not people who I have assigned to a particular job in a future administration,”
And today’s excuse:
“Mr. Donilon is volunteering his time and more than 30 years of accomplishment to help prepare the State Department for an efficient transition to the President-elect, who is taking office at a time of war and when we are confronting a complex and challenging international environment. Mr. Donilon’s experience in foreign affairs as Assistant Secretary of State and Chief of Staff at the State Department is critical to this review process.”
Anyone get the feeling that this is like a puppet in which the string pullers are now calling in all their markers for the job they did for him?
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[I copied this from the “Daily Reckoning” newsletter (w/o permission but with attribution). Bonner is one of the more insightful voices around, and hilarious at the same time.]
[Reprinted from The Daily Reckoning; 2008-November-17]
O! BAMA! THE WORLD TURNS ITS WEARY EYES TO YOU…
By Bill Bonner
[Bill Bonner is the founder and editor of The Daily Reckoning. He is also the author, with Addison Wiggin, of the national best sellers Financial Reckoning Day: Surviving the Soft Depression of the 21st Century and Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis. Bill’s latest book is entitled, Mobs, Messiahs and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics, written with co-author Lila Rajiva.]
Mr. Obama became the president-elect of all the Americans last week. No man’s coffee tasted better on Wednesday morning than it did on Tuesday…no woman’s perfume smelled sweeter. But all over the world, people felt better about themselves, as if the human race had achieved something important.
At least a McCain victory would have caused the press to hold its tongue. Instead, commentators drew all the wrong conclusions and made fools of themselves. Some thought it meant America’s redemption from the sin of slave trade. Others saw a historic transformation that they couldn’t put in words and shouldn’t have tried.
“They did it. They really did it,” wrote the Guardian. “… [T]he American people yesterday stood in the eye of history and made an emphatic choice for change…” It’s the “End of the National Nightmare,” said TIME magazine.
Amid the effervescence came the French. Obama’s victory “arouses a wild yet reasonable hope,” claimed Bernard-Henri Levi in the Financial Times. Mr. Obama’s election will affect us in “at least three concrete ways,” he continued… a decisive turning point in dealing with the ‘racial question’ in the US… hope for an America that began doubting its “famous mission”… and with Obama representing the USA, “anti-Americanism… will have a harder time surviving and it will be forced to revisit its sales pitch.”
Nobody knows what America’s “famous mission” is – certainly not the Americans themselves. And if those are his ‘concrete’ ways, we’re glad Mr. Levi is not building bridges. There was nothing concrete about the hopes Mr. Obama’s victory arouse. Just the contrary…they are all in the ether.
They shouldn’t let French philosophers comment on American politics; they take the whole thing far too seriously. Besides, you never know what they are talking about anyway. But Le Monde saw it clearer. Not only was the paper happy to see the United States finally rinse the stain of racism out of the Stars and Stripes, it was glad to see Americans give free market capitalism the flush too.
Obama will be “reviving the role of regulation in the U.S.; [devising] tax policies to smooth out increasingly wide socio-economic divides; planning a health-care system appropriate to the country’s wealth,” said the paper. In other words, he will be putting in a system of state-directed capitalism, just like they have in France.
None of the commentators we read really understood Obama’s triumph. They saw it in a yearning for truth and a stretch for progress. It was nothing of the sort. The last thing voters want is the truth; they will reject it if it is put in front of them. Instead, what they want is diversion from the real world. What they hope to get from their leaders is a kind of entertainment…in short, a fantasy. Something to cheer them up when they are down. Or something to give them a fright when they are up.
You’ll recall from last week, the last period of Great Calamity – 1914-1945, with its wars, epidemics, Dust Bowls, hyperinflation, Great Depression, mass murders, bankruptcy and revolutions. It was in the middle of this period that Americans elected Franklin Roosevelt, who told them they had “nothing to fear but fear itself.” It was all in their heads! It was a whopper, but it was the whopper they wanted to hear.
And then, on right side of the Atlantic, Britain chose Winston Churchill as prime minister, in May 1940. Churchill crossed his fingers and put his hand behind his back immediately, claiming that Britain was not fighting to save its overseas empire, but to “save the whole world.” He promptly kicked out any official who was “exercising a disturbing or depressing influence,” that is, any who dared to tell the truth about Britain’s disastrous military situation.
Just weeks later – in France, after suffering the most humiliating defeat in their history, the French recalled an old man to power, Philippe Petain. The hero of Verdun made the French feel that they had just regained their national glory, not just lost it. But at the time, France’s fantasy seemed on more solid ground than Britain’s…which just goes to show how unreliable history can be. Sometime make-believe becomes real; usually, it doesn’t. Britain got the backing of the Roosevelt administration – which had promised voters to keep America out of the war – and beat the huns; Churchill died a hero. Petain died in disgrace.
Today, in the U.S.A., the Bush Administration has worked hard to make people fearful – with its torture chambers and preposterous “threat levels.” But the terrorists wouldn’t cooperate; they failed to blow up even a trash truck. Alas, now the mob sweats – and for good reason. People are afraid of losing their houses, their jobs, and their retirements. Losses in equities worldwide top $25 trillion. In U.S. housing alone, some $4 trillion has disappeared. That’s why Obama won; it has nothing to do with national redemption or Sarah Palin. When the world was safe and plush…the mob wanted to feel the frisson of danger. What the public wants now is safety: a movie with a happy ending, not a horror flick. Obama appeared the calmer, more intelligent, candidate. Voters could imagine him as the “black Roosevelt” giving soothing fireside chats and telling the lies they most wanted to hear.
And so, in the national narrative, one cockamamie bamboozle takes the place of the one that went before. Americans were supposed to be fearful; now they are supposed to be confident. They were supposed to be racists; now they are supposed to colorblind. They were supposed to defend free market capitalism to their last breath; now they turn to the state and beg it to protect their last dime.
The duh-Bama team nothing but nest of thieves and scoundrels. Some change, or do Democrats see this as their normal? All the scoundrels and thieves are their scoundrels and thieves. Change we can believe in.
IS this how they plan to keep the dirty little secret that the Democrats caused the crap mortgage meltdown and worldwide recession? All to do away with unfair redlining — Redlinings actual purpose, define people who could not afford to pay mortgages back.
Of course we are feeling like these people are puppets! That’s what the liberal illuminati do, they make puppets and then they put this in office and pick them to be on their team in office. You hit it on the head!
Obama will be a puppet for the liberal illuminati, and this is just the beginning.
White House Philosophy Stoked Mortgage Bonfire:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/business/21admin.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print
…a pretty fascinating report with interviews of dozens of current and former administration officials.
It tends to overemphasize the role of Fannie and Freddie and does neglect the finance/securitization side, but nonetheless, its ammo, taken from the Administration’s own players, is powerful and leveling.